YAY RARELYWRITTEN

Hallucinate In High Fidelity (4160 words) by geckoholicFandom:Constantine (TV)Rating: Teen And Up AudiencesWarnings: Graphic Depictions Of ViolenceCharacters: Mary "Zed" Martin, John Constantine, Chas ChandlerAdditional Tags: caseficSummary: A call from one of John's old friends leads the gang to London. There's something askew in the city's haunted old train stations.

... which is a charming Zed-focused casefic with bonus Hellblazer tie-in. Very much like an episode, minus all the things the TV show sometimes does wrong—aka EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Just enough John and Chas for my taste, and so much of Zed being Zed, holding back and reaching out at the same time, knowing too much and yet not enough until the pieces of the case finally come together. Lovely, in other words, and I'm so grateful!

And I wrote two stories this year, both for XENA, which I'm THRILLED to have matched on—I've offered it a few times and considered writing treats, but hadn't gotten it as my actual assignment until this year.

I wrote this as a main gift—a perfect excuse to rewatch the finale, cry, and then rewatch a whole bunch of other episodes as an emotional unicorn chaser—and then realized that I might have run afoul of "no completely grim stories" (technically from the previous year's letter, but I assumed it still applied). So! I rewatched a few MORE episodes and then also wrote:

distance and a certain light (4638 words) by DamkiannaFandom:Xena: Warrior PrincessRating: Teen And Up AudiencesWarnings: No Archive Warnings ApplyCharacters: Lao Ma, Original Female Character(s)Additional Tags: Taoism, Self-Discovery, BackstorySummary: The third daughter of General Yan is accepted as a fourth-rank wife to His Glorious Highness and King of a Thousand Years Ming Tzu with very little fanfare. (Backstory fic, aka: how Lao Ma learned to stop worrying and develop telekinesis.)

Which somehow is even longer than the main gift! But Lao Ma is emblematic of everything Xena ever taught me to love in fiction (history? Pfft. What if Taoism had been invented by an amazingly compassionate badass woman who ruled a kingdom herself while her asshole husband was in a coma and also had superpowers? WHY NOT).

I've left a scattering of kudos but haven't actually finished going through the collection yet—smaller than last year, and yet still nearly a hundred fics!